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Friday, April 23, 2010

Godless Arminians

kangaroodort, on April 22, 2010 at 5:25 pm Said:

Wrong. J.C. has never said that God is dependent on our choices. What he has said is that God’s knowledge of our choices is dependent on those choices. How could it be otherwise? If God never created us, would he know anything about us? Of course not. So God’s knowledge of us is dependent on their being an “us” to know something about.

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Two itty bitty problems:

1. It drastically scales back the notion of divine creation. God didn't make us who we are. Rather, we seem to preexist in a Platonic plenum, independent of God, and God's creative role is to merely instantiate "us" in time and space.

2. How does God know what to create in the first place if God can know nothing about us unless there is a created "us" to be known?

What's left for the God's creatorship? At that point, what distinguishes Arminianism from atheism? Is Ben's God the Cheshire Cat?

11 comments:

If God never created us, would he know anything about us? Of course not. So God’s knowledge of us is dependent on their being an “us” to know something about.

So the plan to send Jesus was made up "on the fly." God didn't know he would need to send Jesus until after Adam sinned (or after he was made), since God can't know anything about Adam until there is an Adam. What happens to the eternal covenant of redemption on Arminianism?

Not only that, the Bible has prophecies about people who are not born yet and what they will do. But how could this be if God doesn't "know anything about them."?

Come to think of it, what does this even mean? God knows nothing about us until he makes us, until there is a physical "us" in existence. But at that point God knows everything about us? How? Why does he need a physical us to know everything about us? How is his aseity conceived? Does he deduce everything about us from our created nature? But that sounds like determinism. Does he "just know" everything about us after there is an us? That seems arbitrary and ad hoc. And what happens to Molinism? How can God know everything about what we would do in every circumstance only after there is an us in existence? This just sounds wild.

The road to Open Theism is paved with the best of Arminian intentions.

Ben said- God’s knowledge of us is dependent on their being an “us” to know something about.

I said - When does the”us” come into being?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if the “us” are self-determining agents then the “us” would have to physically exist and make choices before there can be any knowledge of what the “us” will do.

How this does not logically entail Open Theism escapes me.

I feel for Steven because he put forward a logical argument and defined his terms and all he gets from J.C. is ” Premises 1, 3, & 4 seem to be incorrectly written”.

They should’ve just sticked to bashing Calvinism, they were good at burning those straw men and getting a pat on the back from all their friends, instead they have put forward their view of Arminianism LFW and the world sees that it is nothing more than Open Theism with lipstick.

Interesting post. Not really interested in responding except to note that I personally do not have a problem with forekowledge containing personal elements, even having to do with election, though I would not entirely conflate the two as Calvinists sometimes seem to do. I have made that clear many times and in many posts.

Since I have a minute, I will leave a few short comments since it seems that you have missed my point entirely in lifting these comments and adding your own personal commentary to them. The issue I was addressing was whether God was dependent on us based on the fact that His knowledge is dependent on us. I say no. There must be something to know for God to know it. If He knows something about us, then there must be an us to know something about. I wasn't getting into when the us would come about. That was beside the point. It had to do with God being dependent simply because his knowledge is dependent. Surely there is a difference between God's knowledge being dependent on something and God Himself being dependent on something.

For example, God loves us. Did God forelove us? I would say yes, but that is not the issue. The issue is whether God is dependent on us simply because His love for us is dependent on us. Obviously, God cannot love us if there will never be an us to love. His love for us is dependent on us coming into being when He creates us. Without His creating us God could not love us. So God's love for us is dependent on an "us" for Him to love. That doesn't mean that God is dependent on us. It only means that His love for us is dependent on us.

It is the same with His knowledge of us (and His love for us is also based on his knowledge of us). But you have lifted my comments and contorted them for reasons I can only guess at.

So Manata's comments are likewise misplaced. God foreknew us from all eternity, but He foreknew us only because He would actually create us. He foreknew what choices we would make only because God would create us and allow us choices to make. I don't know how God does that, but I trust that He can just like I trust that He can create something out of nothing, and for the same reasons- the Bible says so. In denying such things, it seems to me that the Calvinist reduces everything in reality to an expression of God or simply God. It is little wonder then that many have noted that Calvinism seems to quickly reduce into panentheism or full on pantheism:

http://evangelicalarminians.org/node/811

As I noted in the other thread, I think the Calvinist account of foreknowledge/forelove runs into to serious problems as well:

...not to mention the problems of explaining how God's foreknowledge is based soley on His decree that He makes happen down the smallest detail, including every sinful thought, desire, and act, and yet somehow man is to blame for such sins and not God.

All of the mental masturbation that Arminians have to go through to get to a place where they can be secure in their lack of trust, smacks of the Greek philosophy that crept into the church during the Middle Ages. Might as well be a Roman if that's what you believe.

"Since I have a minute, I will leave a few short comments since it seems that you have missed my point entirely in lifting these comments and adding your own personal commentary to them. The issue I was addressing was whether God was dependent on us based on the fact that His knowledge is dependent on us. I say no. There must be something to know for God to know it. If He knows something about us, then there must be an us to know something about. I wasn't getting into when the us would come about. That was beside the point. It had to do with God being dependent simply because his knowledge is dependent. Surely there is a difference between God's knowledge being dependent on something and God Himself being dependent on something."

His knowledge of us is a subset of his self-knowledge. He knows his own idea of you and me. That's the object of knowledge, and that's the object of his creative fiat. He creates us by objectifying his idea of us in space and time. When he creates something, he has a complete idea of what he creates.

If you now admit that God made us who we are by giving each of us our unique set of character traits, then God's knowledge of us is a mode of God's self-knowledge.

Ben said:---There must be something to know for God to know it. If He knows something about us, then there must be an us to know something about.---

Steve responded with:---His knowledge of us is a subset of his self-knowledge. He knows his own idea of you and me.---

Naturally, Steve is exactly correct here, but I wanted to provide you an illustration that might help you see it better. I am a writer (amongst other things I don't get paid to do), and that means that I think about story ideas a lot. I have characters in mind, etc. But not only that, I also have structure in mind too--I know if I want to have a three-act piece, if I want to have a parallelism, if I want to have a theme.

The way I write, I tend to think a long time before I ever begin to type. The result is that by the time I get around to actually writing the story, I fly through it rapidly. I've written the first draft of 75,000 word novels in two weeks twice now (but I can't just sit down and do it--I have to have thought about what I'm doing first).

Until I actually act, none of my story exists outside of my head. Yet when I type the first page, I know what the ending is going to be. I've got the entire thread in mind, including a large chunk of how I'm going to phrase what I want to say, and what scenes must come before others so that I make the point I want to make. I do not need to have actualized anything to know exactly what it will be.

As Steve said, there doesn't have to be an "us" for God to know something about us. Indeed, if this is in any way analogous to how God creates, then God has His plan and purpose and structure in place before (and I mean that logically, not temporally) He has thoughts of how to enact that by creating us. The "us" that God knows is the "us" that He needs in order to accomplish His purpose in His plan, at which point He then creates us so that we are what He needed us to be for His plan and purpose to come about.